


Love Him Protect Him

by KiratheCarrionite



Category: Truman Show (1998)
Genre: Character Study, Drama, F/M, M/M, Romance, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-30
Updated: 2011-06-30
Packaged: 2017-10-20 21:50:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/217432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KiratheCarrionite/pseuds/KiratheCarrionite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dual perspectives on loving Truman Burbank. One wants to protect him from the outside world, the other wants to protect him from the one he lives in. Onesided Sylvia/Truman, onesided OMC/Truman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love Him Protect Him

David is a guard in the moon, and he wears the shirt just like every other security guard in the place. "Love Him Protect Him" the shirts say, and that's exactly what the guards are meant to do. Maybe to the other guards those words didn't mean anything. Maybe to them this job is just a way to get a paycheck. But to David those words mean everything and his job is something he believes in.

David honestly and truly loves Truman Burbank. He really believes in the world Christof has created. And so he's pledged himself to protect both.

Because Truman is more than a man and Seahaven is more than a town. They are an ideal, a piece of perfection. Truman himself is as man ought to be. He has a steady job, a smiling wife, and a pretty house in a safe neighborhood. He's funny and handsome and sweet and kind. He smiles and David is enraptured.

Seahaven too is exactly how things are meant to be. It is always clean, has no crime, and no unrest. The neighbors are nice to each other, and they treat each other with respect. No one goes hungry and you never see vagabonds or bums. There's never any unemployment and everyone has a place to live. Everybody wears perfect clothing and smile at each other out of perfect pretty faces. David thinks he has never seen anything as beautiful as Seahaven.

David grew up in a one-room apartment in New York City with his mother and a handful of constant cockroaches. His mother was a chain-smoker who never went anywhere but her job at the diner and the Church. From her David learned how to hawk a loogie across a room, and the power of faith. Only one of those would come in handy later on.

Where David's mother was able to give her faith to a man on a cross, David gives all of his belief and love and devotion to a man and a town that don't strictly exist. David's okay with that, the unreality of who and what he chooses to protect. Because Truman and Seahaven are better than reality. They're everything as it should be.

* * *

Sylvia hates the show, hates to see what those monsters have done to an innocent man.

But she never stops watching. She can't. She's incapable of looking away. She may have only shared some stolen moments and scarce kisses, but the truth is that she loves Truman Burbank. She does, really and truly. And she will do whatever it takes to protect him from the evil that is using him for its own purposes.

To her, the Truman Show is everything that is wrong with our world. It's based on lies, and corruption, and obsession, and the power of money and prestige to wreck a life and hold it hostage. It sickens her.

The constant product placement and advertisement sets her teeth on edge. It's practically mind control, the way they tell the consumers that they can be just like Truman, hold a piece of Truman, get close to Truman if they just buy this cocoa or that lawn mower. It's almost a lie, just this close to being one. But the people, they buy into it anyway, and they buy the things they're told to.

Because they're all so obsessed. Everyone watches the Truman show, everyone, and God forbid you miss a single second. Though maybe "God" is the wrong word. There's no God here. The people have no love for God anymore. They're too busy watching and watching and buying.

No one cares about the lies. No one cares that Truman is a real person who never had any choice in all of this. No one cares that a corporation should never have gotten their hands on a child. No one cares that it shouldn't have been legal, shouldn't be legal. No one cares that Truman, beloved of the world, is trapped.

But that's because the world is a petty place and very few people really care about Truman the person rather than Truman the obsession of the world at large. And that is the truth and that is why Sylvia hates the Truman Show.

The Show takes the world apart and twists it and reflects our society back at us. The Show gives us Truman, a trapped man in a plastic world of lies. Nothing is real there, and everything is lies and greed and fame and power.

Sylvia knows that she's the only person who really loves Truman. So she will protect him from the double twisted realities of the Show and society, though she's never really sure which is worse.


End file.
